—Subdividing surfaces into cylindrical regions is a significant question in various applications. Even if specific approaches have been described in several domains, most of the time topological properties are not explicitly handled, and the seg-mentation remains mainly driven by the geometry. We present here an original approach to describe the topological and combinatorial nature of a tiling of a surface with cylinders. For this, we first introduce m-cellular complexes, a framework allowing the flexible description of cuttings and tilings. Then we describe n-loops, an extension of the loops for producing tilings with cylinders. Computational issues of n-loops are then addressed, using both topological and geometrical properties of the surface. Finally, we propose two applications, first tiling a surface with large quadrangles patches, and then segmenting surfaces with possible protrusions.